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artu
Promising
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posted November 03, 2019 11:31 AM |
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I mean humanity in general. Yes, if you look at the masses, most people, especially in underdeveloped regions, still believe in the religion they are culturally born into. But information and applications are not produced by faith, universities are no longer clerical institutions, they teach secular knowledge, governments don't make laws based on scriptural debates, you dont actually treat me like some heretic who needs to be burned at the stake.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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artu
Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 03, 2019 11:49 AM |
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To your edit: It doesnt matter whether we know it or not, if the universe is deterministic, there are no various possibilites but an inevitable chain of events, hence there can be no responsibility. We can sit back and try to guess what is more probable about how those chain of events will turn out, but it would be like trying to guess the end of a movie that is already directed and put on the shelf. So what you can observe or not doesnt change a thing regarding the subject.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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Neraus
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Pain relief cream seller
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posted November 03, 2019 12:50 PM |
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Again tho, I didn't talk about the morality or ethics of such a system, just wanted to play devil's advocate for a moment regarding the possibility of the system despite the appearances.
Besides, I agree on the ethical conclusions, not only does it deprive us of responsibility, but a deterministic universe means that in a Christian context that sin is inevitable and that there are souls born to burn in hell, which contradicts the idea of God being benevolent. Actually, it utterly destroys the idea that God made Himself unto flesh to save mankind from sin and eternal damnation if still there are souls born to go to hell.
Which was my original point against the idea of predestination.
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Noli offendere Patriam Agathae quia ultrix iniuriarum est.
ANTUDO
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 03, 2019 02:07 PM |
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A deterministic universe cancels out possibilities (and in that sense, probabilities in an ontological sense), you can still talk about probabilities in an epistemological sense, as in, regarding to what we can know or guess but such an epistemological argument is quite out of place even if you were playing the devil’s advocate.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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Neraus
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Pain relief cream seller
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posted November 03, 2019 02:25 PM |
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And I wasn't arguing for the existence of alternate possibilities in a deterministic world, but that even if we were to map out probabilities, in that framework an event that is supposed to happen will happen, regardless of probability.
I just didn't want to leave a chance to argue against using a concept of physics outside of it. lol
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Noli offendere Patriam Agathae quia ultrix iniuriarum est.
ANTUDO
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 03, 2019 05:26 PM |
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artu said:
@blizz
There may be no “before big bang” if there was no time. But how did the big bang bang occur etc are questions that may have quite counter-intuitive answers, by your choice of word. Or maybe there is a multiverse with a bigger set of physical rules. We dont know, maybe we never will, it’s not set in stone that humans will eventually understand everything.
Saying god is beyond our reasoning, it is out of our perimeter etc and then calling it the ultimate reality is mindless. Basically, you define what is out of reach as god, yours is literally the god of gaps and to attribute such qualities to such an unknowable being as “ultimate reality, omnithis, omnithat” while you admit it is something beyond your capacity to comprehend it, is just absurd.
Why would it be absurd? It's reasonable to assume that God would seem unreasonable, and completely unreasonable to think that God would be reasonable. If God was reasonable or comprehensible then he wouldn't be God. That's the whole point of calling him God.
About "the god of the gaps". The thing about the god of the gaps is that contrary to the gaps becoming smaller (like a few public atheist claim) they have actually gotten much, much larger, because the more we learn the more and more questions it opens up. So with causality you keep going back and back and back but there has to be something beyond causality for there to be causality.
Quote:
We very well know how the belief of god evolved in anthropological terms today, we know the origins of Abrahamic folklore, we know how monotheism evolved from politheism and how politheism evolved from animism and the like./quote]
Ok? Of course. What are you trying to say from this?
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artu
Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 03, 2019 05:38 PM |
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It’s absurd because on one hand you build your arguments on how unknowable god or gods would be to our human mind and on the other, you claim things like he is the ultimate reality and he may be acting like this or that, which is all as anthropomorphic as saying he has wrath or a son.
And what I mean by the anthropologic part is, not only you arbitrarily fill the gaps but you fill it with a concept that has a much better explanation in the first place. So in this regard, it is not much different than explaining the universe with Spider-Man while we’re holding the first issue and its story in our hands.
Some gaps are getting bigger, some smaller, we certainly know more but the scale of knowledgable phenomenon is getting bigger, regardless, the habit of filling the gaps with the super-natural is over.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 03, 2019 05:52 PM |
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artu said:
It’s absurd because on one hand you build your arguments on how unknowable god or gods would be to our human mind and on the other, you claim things like he is the ultimate reality and he may be acting like this or that, which is all as anthropomorphic as saying he has wrath or a son.
And what I mean by the anthropologic part is, not only you arbitrarily fill the gaps but you fill it with a concept that has a much better explanation in the first place. So in this regard, it is not much different than explaining the universe with Spider-Man while we’re holding the first issue and its story in our hands.
Some gaps are getting bigger, some smaller, we certainly know more but the scale of knowledgable phenomenon is getting bigger, regardless, the habit of filling the gaps with the super-natural is over.
No, not really. That's not what statistics are telling us. Children born in atheist families are often more likely to become spiritual or religious than children who are born in religious families are to become atheist. Atheism is deteriorating in the east where by far most atheists in the world live because people realize it's a dead end.
Not that these people (including myself) necessarily say that we are 100% positive of so and so or such and such, but they have reasonable belief in the supernatural and transcendent. It's an inborn human characteristic and most people agree it's more reasonable than the atheist worldview. It makes sense that something wouldn't make sense if you keep going back and back with causality.
Human beings have been religious since their beginning. They assigned spiritual value to nature and to themselves, had funerals, etc., and they were correct in thinking this way. Not very many people actually believe that we are alone. The Abrahamic religion developed further and things like monotheism came about (monotheism wasn't exclusive to Judaism though), and monotheism has done more good for society than the wheel. Just because we can observe changes in religion and society doesn't mean those changes came about only through human means.
edit: I'll grant that we might be on the cusp of all sorts of societal change. Within the next 100 or 200 years we might be able to take control of our evolution and fix our society in all sorts of ways that we previously never could. We might not have to rely on a lottery system for talent, genius, work ethic, etc. We could become hundreds or thousands of times more productive and actually be able to solve things that we previously had no hope of solving as a result of an enhanced humanity. If we have billions of people that make Mozart or Einstein look like village idiots, the sky is the limit. This is all well and good as long as we respect human rights in the process, but I highly doubt those gaps are going to get smaller though. They're much more likely to keep getting bigger and bigger.
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Zenofex
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posted November 03, 2019 06:26 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 18:27, 03 Nov 2019.
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So, to summarize: gaps don't disappear = God is real.  You're making Aristotle proud in the afterlife. 
I don't want to get involved into this (mostly because I don't have time for Internet arguments lately), but will just point out that monotheism existed before the Abrahamic religions. Just in case the Western Ubermenschen supremacists were unaware.
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artu
Promising
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posted November 03, 2019 06:54 PM |
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1- I don’t know what you mean by “the East.” U.S. East, Far East, Middle East? But that’s not what the statistics are telling us at all, in general. There are more non-religious (in the traditional sense) people all over the world than ever before. There is also a correlation with higher levels of education and non-religiousity in general. Atheism is not a dead end, it’s simply a realistic position about assuming a god or gods exist when you have no rational reason to assume so. This notion that people who have no super-natural belief all turn nihilistic emotionally is a myth. Such things depend on your psychological state, not your cosmological ideas. I can show you thousands of religious people who “feel” that life is dull or meaningless and many materialists who have meaning in their life, through family or achievement or whatever they attach value to.
2- Trying to kick out causality out the door on one hand and then trying to prove why it is the “reasonable” thing to do is quite ironic. And anything you apply to the universe in terms of “there must be something before X” including causality also applies to the concept of god, it is much more unlikely that a god exists without any cause and effect than a universe does, because one is a persona where as the other one is just space-time. God is a non-explanation in terms of logic, it’s just an extra layer between the unknown and your desire to know.
3- Human beings haven’t always been religious, they became religious after reaching a certain point of abstractive power and storytelling. Which dates back to 75K to 50K years before. We are a much older specie. Needless to say, the early stories were much more simpler like worshipping the souls of the ancestors or natural phenomenon that had motion. Mainstream monotheistic religions are a product of agri-culture and they are in decline because the agri-cultural societies are in decline, just like hunter-gatherers. The stories no longer fit the norms. Now, if you take humans as “homo-narrans” the storytelling man, yes, we are still that, we produce a coherent story to organise and make sense of life, we give meaning to things. Yet, at this point, the stories hardly rely on the super-natural, masses in millions don’t transform overnight but human rights or secular law are also narratives that have no corresponding reality in the external universe. A tsunami knows no human rights. Unlike a dog or a cat (who also protect their young), humans also attribute sacredness to motherhood, they can do it with a super-natural narrative or secular law but it is storytelling in the end. And even if every person that had ever lived was religious in that sense, and even if they were religious in the traditional sense, worshipping the super-natural, it would have told us nothing about the external reality but only about the tendency of the human psyche. But we are at a point where we examine the flaws of our own psyche, too. Spirituality is a very flexible term, most people don’t actually believe in spirits anymore but I can feel “spiritual” or transcendental listening to a symphony, doesn’t mean I actually think there is some super-natural power behind it. I won’t go piss on my grandfather’s grave, I’ll attend the funeral and genuinely behave respectful but that doesn’t mean I am not aware it is just dust and bones under the ground. An overwhelmingly crowded number of people also tend to believe astrology all over the world, but astrology is no more something that is being taken seriously in terms of actually explaining things, is it. Kings no longer have astrology advisers they talk to before going to war. What a lot of people “seems to find reasonable” doesn’t matter as long as a lot of people really don’t think things through and base their decisions on emotion.
And whether monotheism was beneficial or not overall is beside the point, it is an explanation, what we discuss here is whether it is true or not. Though the cons of religion throught history was just as many as the pros. You don’t get to cherry-pick even if you stick to pragmatism.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 03, 2019 07:59 PM |
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Most atheists are baby boomers in Eastern Asia. Western Europe has become much less religious but that's a small percentage of the world population and some of those trends have been reversing, albeit partially due to immigrants restoring sanity to a dying race.
People become less religious with education. This is partly because wider exposure naturally makes people question their upbringing, including their religious background. Also partly because many institutions are belligerent to religion and actively try to squash it. Also partly (or largely) because world religions have valuable things to say about the pelvic area that the average 20-something prefers not to hear. The trends starts to reverse as people get a little older, more emotionally mature, and become further educated. So no, education = non-religion is not correct.
Spirituality is indeed a broad term, but correctly used, it doesn't mean something like listening to music and feeling emotions. It refers to any belief system that would transcend the material universe. Again: it's rooted in the idea that we aren't alone and this goes back as deeply in human history as we can find it. The vast majority of people in the world are spiritual in some fashion and in any officially atheist part of the world that had to suffer under idealogues in recent history it has made a strong comeback.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 03, 2019 09:11 PM |
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Edited by artu at 21:15, 03 Nov 2019.
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Oh, really? Because I would really like to hear a “further educated “ astrophysicist or a biologist explaining natural phenomenon and the universe in spiritual terms of “how we are not all alone.” Nobody is trying to “squash” religion, it’s just an insufficient method of explaining things. You don’t try to squash dragons or elves, you just treat them as the stories they are. A myth can of course contain “valuable things to say” and there’s no problem with that as long as you treat it as the literature and symbolism it is. La Fontaine fables also have valuable things to say but we know crows can’t talk. Believing in magic is not an opinion or hypothesis and you certainly don’t have to believe in Eros to fall in love. You can learn about what love means to, or have meant to people by examining how they came up with the mythological figure of Eros, that’s something else. Storytelling being universal to human cultures since they have reached a certain level of abstractive power and they all having a mythos phase is not an evidence of those myths themselves, at some point, they also came up with logos. Today, individuals, including scientists (seldom compared to rest of the population), can still deal with their everyday struggles anyway they see fit and “spirituality” or sticking to their religious cultural heritage can be a part of that. By which methods the universe is explained in this age is a totally different ball game. If you go to a physics class and claim it was some god who created the big bang, they will not “squash you” but your claim would be justifiably considered invalid. However, I’m really starting to think that you are trolling at this point because you are actually explaining how modern education is basing its policies on “what an average 20-something prefers to hear.” So, I guess, they all prefer equations with multiple variables or 17th century history to pop music!
(And atheism is not an ideology, it is an epistemological position. There are no “officially atheist” countries, there are communist ones, there are countries that have no official religion. Some totalitarian states oppressing individual religiosity can of course blow back, such things can’t transform through police state measures. Same had been true for states that dictated religion or “spirituality” too.)
If you have nothing to repeat besides this argumentum ad populum, and I have already mentioned, even if it had been completely true, it would have only given us insight about human psyche, not the universe or external reality, it would be nice for you to stop writing in circles of fallacy.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 03, 2019 09:39 PM |
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Physicists have never written in terms of spirituality, ever. They write about physics. I wouldn't start talking about God in a physics assignment. You are putting words in my mouth.
Yes, there are officially atheist countries and it is drafted into their system. You are making things up. They were/are overwhelmingly the most barbaric, murderous, and anti-human collection of countries in human history.
Yes, many institutions are belligerent towards religion. They don't treat religion the way they treat elves. Your vitriol is coming through, which is exactly what happens with many corrupt privileged people in positions of power or influence, except instead of saying things they can actually physically or professionally or economically hurt people, which they do.
Your recent post is very poorly written and very much not in touch with the world at all.
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Drakon-Deus
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Qapla'
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posted November 03, 2019 09:42 PM |
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Neraus said:
@DD
We are what? 3 guys now? I fondly remember Svartzorn, when we argued to no end about the Immaculate conception, and then agreed on one thing, at the very least we Catholics and Orthodox should band together to fight heresy. Good times.
Let's not forget Homer171 either. 
I am educated in the Orthodox theology, but I try to respect all, be they Catholics or yes Protestants. I don't think arguing over doctrine is what God wants of us. Many will be surprised when Christ rejects them, and the same way many will be surprised when they are accepted.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 03, 2019 09:53 PM |
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Drakon-Deus said:
I don't think arguing over doctrine is what God wants of us.
Of course it isn't what he wants, but when one group says that Jesus was a prophet and another group that he is God, (using a historic example) there is a problem in calling them the exact same religion. It would be nice if everybody agreed and got along but without a central authority the varying viewpoints start to quickly multiply and things descend into chaos and the word "Christian" loses any definitive meaning. Everything becomes subjective and individualized until each person is a church of one.
You still try to get along of course regardless of a person's religion or lack of religion.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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Drakon-Deus
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Qapla'
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posted November 03, 2019 09:56 PM |
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Blizzardboy said:
Of course it isn't what he wants, but when one group says that Jesus was a prophet and another groups he is God, (using a historic example) there is a problem in calling them the exact same religion. It would be nice if everybody agreed and got along but without a central authority the varying viewpoints start to quickly multiply and things descend into chaos and the word "Christian" loses any definitive meaning.
Yes, certainly there has to be a common ground. But if other believers hold that that the Bible is inspired by God and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that is enough for me to call them Christian. I wasn't speaking of Gnostics or other historical groups.
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artu
Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 03, 2019 10:08 PM |
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blizz said:
I wouldn't start talking about God in a physics assignment.
That's exactly what you've been doing. It's not an assignment but the context was still how this universe is what it is.
blizz said:
Yes, many institutions are belligerent towards religion. They don't treat religion the way they treat elves.
As long as people who believe in elves don't try to explain the universe and shape society according to elves, I don't think they'll bother.
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JollyJoker
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posted November 03, 2019 11:29 PM |
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I already mentioned this somewhere, but FOR ME PERSONALLY the different interpretations of "the word of god" are one of many proofs that there is no god, because I tend to think that "god" would have made sure HIS word cannot be interpreted.
I'm fully aware that this is my very personal opinion and there is no need to discuss it, but I'm expecting a certain standard from an entity to worship.
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Blizzardboy
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posted November 04, 2019 12:00 AM |
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The Bishop of Rome was granted singular, divinely protected authority to keep people from serious error. The current authority is Pope Francis, before him was Pope Benedict, then Pope St John Paul II, and so on and so forth. There is room for some personal interpretation in revealed text (since human beings combine what they read with their own experiences to make it uniquely their own) but not to the extent that they can make up whatever they feel like. Any revealed text that has no voice can of course be taken advantage of and manipulated either maliciously or through simple human error .
But even then it's not absolutely necessary for there to be a massive sign in the sky telling people how to live. The fact is, there have already been massive miraculous signs with news reporters and everything, such as with Fatima, Portugal in 1917 and that doesn't change how people live or act. Human beings are a hybrid of intellect and passion, so if somebody doesn't want to believe something there is literally nothing you can do to make it happen. Not even God can do this. If a planet-sized angel appeared in the sky tonight there would still be atheists and apatheists the next day. They would argue that it was aliens, or extra-dimensional beings, or secret government technology, or any number of other things. In the distant past people did the exact same thing, except they were polytheists so if something miraculous happened they figured that was just the work of one god, but they could still invoke other gods. Not much changed in terms of their worldview.
And then of course we're assuming God is even interested in having an absolute and undeniable presence, which in the Christian religion he does not. There is deliberately some level of obscurity, but not too much. Also, belief in itself is not a virtue and a person can have belief but still be a horrible person, though with atheism being horrible becomes easier.
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted November 04, 2019 12:31 AM |
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So it was all dark humor. You son of a dark matter.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost
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This thread is pages long: 
